In one of the last blog posts, we took a closer look on the available MQTT client tools out there. While these all of these tools work great, they have a drawback in common: You need to download and install them. Some they don’t work on all operating systems. And others don’t support all MQTT 3.1 features like username/passwords.

We are proud to present a MQTT client which implements all MQTT 3.1 features and which runs on any operating system. Introducing the HiveMQ Websockets Client.

This client runs on any modern browser (sorry Internet Explorer <10!) and you can use it to publish and subscribe at the same time. Under the hood it leverages the awesome Eclipse Paho Javascript library for MQTT and Zurbs Foundation as CSS framework.

This web client works perfectly with any HiveMQ MQTT broker with websockets enabled.
Now let’s take a closer look on the features of the web client:

Connecting the client

Connecting with mqttdashboard.com

You can connect to any HiveMQ (even a broker running on localhost!) with all the MQTT 3.1 features you want to use like Last Will and Testament and Username/Password. It’s of course possible to use secure websockets which use SSL to encrypt your traffic.

Subscribe

A few subscriptions

You can subscribe to any number of topics you want. Topic wildcards are fully supported. All topics subscriptions are marked with a color of your choice to differentiate the incoming messages on that topic subscription. When clicking the “X” on a topic subscription, you can unsubscribe from the topic.

Incoming messages

Incoming messages appear in the “Messages” panel and contain all relevant information about the publish like Quality of Service, topic and a timestamp.

Publish

Publishing via the web client

The web client supports publishing of messages with all characteristics a MQTT publish can have like Quality of Service and the retain flag.

The source code is available on Github here. Tell us in the comments if you like the idea of a portable MQTT client for the browser which uses kick-ass technology like websockets or drop us a line via e-mail!